We Are All Facing Extinction

by Susan GriffinDecember 12, 2011

We live in a society that pits the needs of human beings against nature. Over and over again, through advertisements and public pronouncements, we’re urged to sacrifice forests, mountaintops, rivers, wholes species, or even the quality of the air we breathe so we can have energy, jobs, economic well-being.

Just as other animals are driven by both a will to survive and a tendency toward compassion, humans also share both of these drives. Here, a monkey in Cambodia grooms its neighbor. Credit: Creative Commons/Trey Ratcliff.

But the conflict that is conjured by corporate interests between what we need and the needs of the earth should not be confused with the human condition. Nor does the narrow idea of “self-interest” that is a corollary to this divisive thinking derive from any realistic understanding of human nature. Compassion for others, including animals, is hardly opposed to the will to survive or even the desire for pleasure — drives that human beings share with animals. It should not be surprising that human nature, which has evolved in tandem with all other life forms on the earth, should include the capacity for compassion; indeed empathy is implicate in the human nervous system, necessary to the way we learn, and thus essential to our survival. This aspect of human nature reflects the systemic nature of nature — in effect, we belong to one body, the earth, in which every cell, every atom, affects every other.

To place the campaigns that address climate change in competition with campaigns that address the extinction of species, as Allen Kanner does in his article “Why Extinction Matters as Much as Climate Change,” is less a departure from the divisive mindset that dominates post-industrial society than a subtle continuation of it. His arguments seem to ignore the fact that human beings are animals and that global warming is threatening us with extinction too. Considering the prominent role the polar bear has played in campaigns designed to warn us about global warming, Kanner’s accusation that the movements to stop climate change only present the consequences to human beings and ignore the effects on all other forms of life on the planet seems unfair at best. Given that the thought of the polar bear disappearing has moved many to tears, the problem would seem to lie not in our indifference to other species but in our failure to recognize that since our habitat is also in danger, we too are under threat. We do not need to think less about our self-interest (as Kanner suggests we ought to do). We need to made more aware of it.

In fact we are all faced with extinction. Along with forests, animals, and countless life forms, if we do not address climate change quickly, we will simply perish. Yet our awareness has been blunted. The same corporate mindset that places our welfare in conflict with the earth is also denying the gravity as well as the human causes of global warming. In complicity, too many governments and international institutions all over the world have been far too slow in responding to what becomes daily apparent to scientists as a grave danger.

With so many people living in concrete cities, our society has become dissociated from nature, the author writes. Credit: Creative Commons/Adrian Boliston.

One of the difficulties the movement to address climate change faces is that we are living in a society that is dissociated from nature in countless ways. With so many people living in cities or paved-over suburbs, often spending the great part of their lives in front of a computer screen or a television or on as assembly line in factory with no windows, the reality of our surroundings and along with that our dependency on plants, trees, water, air, and other animals for our survival, has faded from daily consciousness. Whether pandering advertisements or lifestyles that separate us from natural habitats, so much in modern civilization has acted to diminish our sensual, concrete, and yes, practical knowledge about how to survive on earth.

By contrast the awareness of many indigenous peoples, who know from their daily lives that their sustenance depends on the health of the ecospheres around them, has not been blunted in the same way: not only do they see the effects, but they are also alarmed over the consequences of global warming.

This October when I was in Washington, D.C., I attended an exhibit at the Smithsonian Museum called Conversations with the Earth, Indigenous Voice on Climate Change. Through photographs, quotes, and videotape, the indigenous leaders in this exhibit — men and women in villages from the Arctic Circle to the Amazon forest — give testimony about the ways that their lives, their livelihoods, their cultures, and even their cultural memory is being threatened by global warming. To experience global warming through their eyes is to open to a profound level of grief, a grief that is not opposed to compassion toward other creatures, but is instead kindred.

An intimate kinship with all creation also exists among many of us who live in more technological societies, who experience what Glenn Albrecht has called “Sostaligia,” the psychological effects we feel when the life that surrounds us is being diminished or destroyed, a grief that would certainly include the death of species. Kanner agrees that compassion is part of human nature and in part his article is a plea to enlarge that compassion.

But if compassion and the subsequent grief for others that we suffer is part of our nature, could not the wish to prevent the extinction of animals be considered a kind of self-interest? And here also I would caution against fragmentation, in this case dividing physical from psychological needs. To feel grief is certainly a physical as well as a psychological experience. And physical deprivation also has psychological consequences. To separate these two responses is to mimic the separation our culture makes between matter and intellect or between human beings and nature, including other species.

Healing this false division is an essential ingredient to meeting both the challenge of climate change and extinction. Kanner nods briefly toward the causal relationship between climate change and animal extinction, but he does not give this connection the full attention it deserves. Rather his aim is to elevate animal extinction in public discourse as the most crucial issue, the sine qua non that ought to determine the ecological movement’s agenda.

This competitive approach obscures a connection that has within it a fertile possibility regarding the conduct of research that might reveal how the extinction of species actually adds to global warming and vice versa. The symbiotic and synergistic processes tying these phenomena together must be endless.

In the meantime, Kanner’s elevation of extinction over climate change (a phenomenon that it must be repeated threatens mass extinction to countless species) seems to ignore the severity and urgency of the threat we are all facing. He deplores the images of melting glaciers that are shown over and over, but these images have been chosen both as scientific indications of the acceleration of warming and also a literal tip of the iceberg, not just a symbol or a symptom but the beginning of a world wide disaster.

Climate change is not only affecting other animals -- it is already threatening entire human communities as well. Tuvalu is destined to become one of earth’s first nations to be washed away due to the effect of global warming. Here, a Tuvaluan family shares a sketch depicting the rising water levels threatening their home and livelihood. Credit: Juriaan Booij (thesinkingoftuvalu.com).

Though I find these images from the Arctic terrifying and thus both informing and effective, I would like to see more images that bring the phenomenon home, that indeed focus even more on self-interest than images of glaciers do. Yes, because global warming is a pattern and not one incident, scientists cannot say for certain whether each tornado or hurricane terrible winter storm or drought is caused or made worse by global warming, but nevertheless I would like to see these images used too, because they wake us up to the consequences of ignoring climate change. Like all animals, we possess an intelligence that is located and sensual and serves to help us survive a threat that is unfortunately all too real.

Accordingly, though I agree with Kanner’s concern that the awful effects of global warming, such as melting glaciers or the denuding of the Amazon, can bolster our civilization’s fear of, enmity with, and hence wish to control nature (which certainly, given centuries of alienation from nature, is a possibility), the answer is not to deny that these dreadful events are occurring. Denial is indeed a central part of the pattern by which our civilization has created the illusion that we are not part of nature, not subject to natural process and that in any case we can control nature by meeting every challenge with technological innovation. Again I argue that we should neither erase nor hide these images from public awareness but instead add to them, both analytically and symbolically, the understanding that nature is not the villain here but rather decisions made by wealthy and powerful interests that in fact more often than not do not even benefit all of us even economically.

We may live in a society that pits individual self-interest against care for the larger social body and for nature. But this way of thinking presents a false idea of human nature. It is in fact an assumption that benefits the privileged and justifies exploitation. Which is one of many reasons I would have liked to see greater discernment regarding class perspectives and a discussion of the influence of corporate power on media in this article.

And on this subject, I know Kanner will agree with me that compassion is not the sole responsibility of individuals, but is also a collective responsibility. In a culture such as Ladahk (a culture in the western region of Himalayas about which Helena Norberg-Hodge has written so eloquently in Ancient Futures) in which the community provides mutual care and the efforts to survive are collective, compassion and self-interest are intertwined. The question for us now would be how do we build a society that enables mutual compassion not only between human beings, but also between species and with all of nature.

(To read other perspectives on extinction, climate change, and the rights of nature, click here.)

Susan Griffin’s most recent work, the anthology she co-edited, Transforming Terror: Remembering the Soul of the World has received high praise. Among the twenty books she has written, A Chorus of Stones: The Private Life of War, a New York Times Notable Book, was a finalist the Pulitzer Prize, winning the Northern California Book Award. An earlier volume, the groundbreaking Woman and Nature, is credited with inspiring eco-feminism. Named by Utne Reader as one of a hundred important visionaries for the new millennium, she has been has been the recipient of an NEA Grant, a Macarthur Grant for Peace and International Cooperation, and a Guggenheim Fellowship.

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5 Responses to We Are All Facing Extinction

rex levi
January 4, 2012 at 8:06 pm

Enjoyed these perspectives… however, a big picture should be expounded: both submittals agree that climate warming is a multiple occurring pattern; individual impact cumulative equates to human house keeping and society is failing. If we didn’t wait until dire consequences to fix our poor habits and address big business methods, the world would last longer and be a better place. As a marine enviomentalist junky, if you missed it, I recommend viewing 60minutes.com’s segment on pristine Cuban reefs which aired a few weeks ago on TV. Guess what- global warming has not affected this habitat(disgraces what has become of our nearby reef structures & enviroment in Florida). Luck? Fluke? Or better shepherding?

This is a question derivn by the politics of those who support it. Don’t believe me? Over the past thirty years, these are the same people who have been arguing to “save the whales”, the rainforests were disappearing, and that the Earth was about to enter into a new ice age. Yes, that’s correct, those same environmentalists were claiming the Earth was going into an ice age, then that it was going to heat uncontrollably, and now, since they realize they have no idea what the temperature is going to do (in fact, they’ve been predicting massive numbers of hurricanes due to the “high” temperatures, and each year they’re wrong), they’ve started calling it “climate change.”School has become nothing more than an opportunity to indoctrine students into liberal ideology.

Finally some one is sounding the alarm regarding the survival of our species. To be concerned about the survival of other species is in our own self interest. We could call this: “enlightened self interest.”

I am responding to your photo and caption about so many people living in cities that our society has become disconnected from nature, while at the same time, warning about the problems of global warming. You fail to realize the cities are a solution to environmental problems – not the cause.

Living in cities has much less of an environmental impact than living in suburbs. My wife and I live in New York City and will go a lifetime without owning car – we walk or take public transportation everywhere. We live in a 1 bedroom apartment that uses a fraction of the energy of the average house in the country. And our building did not contribute to urban sprawl, the destruction of land or animal species, or pushing scarce resources into outer areas or the need for additional infrastructure. The same cannot be said about living in the suburbs or rural areas.

It’s the people who are not living in cities that are doing the most harm to our environment.

And we are surrounded by water and have several hundred parks in New York, so we are not far from nature. So please rethink your stance about cities.

Liberals tend to believe that altohugh there are cyclical changes in climate, those changes are being compounded by pollution from the burning of fossil fuels. Science, for the most part, agrees. Conservatives seem to believe that global warming is caused by god and it’s nothing to worry about. They want to keep using oil and coal until there is not a bit of it left and THEN they will look into alternative energy solutions.